The Christian of to-day believes, no less firmly than Paley did, that God is omnipotent, and that God is love. But the old couleur de rose view of Nature is no longer possible, "Destruction is the rule; life is the exception." The waste is enormous; the suffering terrible. The many perish; the few survive. All down the scale of sentient being, "perfected by suffering" seems written in unmistakable characters. The law of God's work in Nature is indeed progress, but progress at a tremendous and, as it seems to us, reckless cost. These are facts for which neither evolution, except incidentally, nor any other theory of Nature, is responsible. But they are facts of which any theory, theological or scientific, must now take cognizance. They are as fatal to the old teleology of Paley as the facts of embryology are to the theory of independent creations. We may still reverently say, "It is God's will," but that is only an admission that we can not explain the facts, or justify them to the reason or the conscience. It may be a necessary, as it certainly is a devout, attitude of mind, but there is in it an undertone of despair.
Evolution is not responsible for the problem. Can it help us in the solution? The old teleology was destroyed by the new facts, and Darwin offers us a deeper and wider view of purpose based upon these facts. We used to start with the assumption that everything exists solely for the good of man. And though we expressed our belief in an all-wise and beneficent Creator, our teleological inquiries would sometimes take the unsubmissive form of Pourquoi Dieu fait-il tant de mouches? (Why did God make so many flies?) a question which was popularly supposed to merge itself in that of the origin of evil. The new teleology proceeds differently. It seeks to give a reason for the existence of each species, by fitting it into its place in the genealogical tree, and relating all the species to one another in the unity of the whole. As Asa Gray puts it:
- ↑ "Natural Theology," pp. 370, 371.
